Twelve Bar Blues

Reviewed by Peter HutchingsJune 22 2002

TWELVE BAR BLUES
By Patrick Neate
Viking, 401pp, $32

A "twelve bar blues" is, this book informs us, "the most common harmonic progression in all jazz." It comprises 12 bars based on three types of harmonies. It is also the music of displaced Africans: both lament and comfort.

Twelve Bar Blues, the winner of last year's Whitbread novel award, takes this form for its own structure, running its three inter-related stories through the blues progression, over two books.

The main story is set in early-20th-century Louisiana, and concerns the lives of jazz cornet player Lick Holden and his stepsister and love, Sylvie. The subordinate story is set in a contemporary, fictionalised Zimbabwe (Zambawi), and introduces a tribal chief and a witch doctor who recall the novel's prelude and root story, set in Africa in 1790.

Finally, the contemporary story of Sylvia, a 40ish ex-prostitute in search of the answer to the mystery of her African heritage (her parents appear to be white), brings all three stories together.

The stories echo the human triangles which run through each of these tales.

At one level, this is an entertaining, involving book, trading upon the suspense inherent in the twists and turns of its intergenerational family plots. Neate can tell a story, and does so through a variety of voices and perspectives.

But this is both the book's strength and failing. Like his almost solitary white character, Jim, the author is a misplaced white boy entranced by blackness. That he so convincingly ventriloquises aspects of African, Afro-American and Afro-British experiences only serves to highlight the difficulties of a fiction which engages through its realism.

What the reader is asked to accept is that the novel's strength is its authentic grasp of a number of historical and contemporary forms of oppression and dislocation. In dealing with prostitution, for instance, it purports to show the reality of prostitutes' lives, and gives some kudos to the unabashed self-knowledge of Sylvie, a woman with no illusions about either the blackness concealed within her pale skin or her life as a prostitute. To be without illusion is a central value for Neate's characters, and the goal of his narrative.

However, the eradication of illusion - through discovering and coming to terms with blackness - is itself a fiction engendered by a white writer from London, clearly absorbed by narratives of blackness, but whose expertise consists of a degree in anthropology and a post-university year spent in Zimbabwe. Whatever he learnt there doesn't seem to qualify him as an expert in the black experience.

Neate is a clever, skilled and well-researched writer who seems to crave contact with something authentic and lived, but whose fiction will be nothing more than finely wrought amusement until he finds that experience for himself.

This is not to argue for the sort of niche-marketing social realism that brought us The Hand that Signed the Paper, and other more sincere forms of semi-literate typing that try to get by on their colourfully marginalised life-experience credentials. Rather, it is to question the value of a novel that can appear to be the literary equivalent of a black-and-white minstrel show.

Peter Hutchings is head of the humanities school at the University of Western Sydney.